Science & Technology

The rise of China and the election of President Donald Trump have led many to believe that the American century is effectively over. But the United States still has important power advantages — both globally and in the Asia-Pacific region — that will last well beyond the next four or even eight years.

During the Future of Diplomacy Project's 2017 'Europe Week' series, diplomats, scholars, and policymakers visited the Kennedy School to examine Europe's greatest challenges. 

“If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”

Those were the key words of a speech by Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham last week. My response — as a fully paid-up member of the rootless cosmopolitan class — was: Ooh la la!

Welcome to the new class war, Brexit edition.

On one side, the citizens of the world — the Weltbürger — who are only citizens in the sense that Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was a citizen. We have at least two passports. We speak at least three languages. And we have at least four homes, not one of them in the town where we were born.

In many Western democracies, this is a year of revolt against elites. The success of the Brexit campaign in Britain, Donald Trump’s unexpected capture of the Republican Party in the United States, and populist parties’ success in Germany and elsewhere strike many as heralding the end of an era. As Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens put it, “the present global order – the liberal rules-based system established in 1945 and expanded after the end of the Cold War – is under unprecedented strain. Globalization is in retreat.”

In fact, it may be premature to draw such broad conclusions.

Some economists attribute the current surge of populism to the “hyper-globalization” of the 1990s, with liberalization of international financial flows and the creation of the World Trade Organization – and particularly China’s WTO accession in 2001 – receiving the most attention. According to one study, Chinese imports eliminated nearly one million US manufacturing jobs from 1999 to 2011; including suppliers and related industries brings the losses to 2.4 million.

"Global public health efforts tend to be be focused on reproductive and family issues. But health programs are very much a part of our security — hard security — apparatus. Even if the Ebola virus never makes it to American shores, a large outbreak in one or two countries in Africa would eventually have ripple effects leading to destabilization of governments, concerns about the global economy, refugee crises, and the end of immigration access to the United States for those in the impacted countries."

"Could the corporate appeal of the H-1B visa program be coupled with the idealism of the DREAM Act for an entirely different way of looking at immigration reform? The White House is content to leave the exact statutory proposal nameless as a nod to a potential compromise that may be more limited than the DREAM Act, but a step in the right direction."

"The conventional wisdom among those who looked at the Middle East used to be that you had a choice either of supporting the autocrat or being stuck with the religious extremists. The extraordinary diffusion of information created in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries reveals a strong middle that we weren't fully aware of. What is more, new technologies allow this new middle to coordinate in ways unseen before Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, and this could lead to a very different politics of the Middle East. This introduces a new complexity to our government's dealings with the region."

"In a global economy, it takes a certain smugness to create an immigration system that undermines our most dominant economic need — and a certain amount of short-sightedness to educate future global leaders and then force them to set up shop elsewhere."